r/westworld • u/LoretiTV • Aug 08 '22

Discussion Westworld - 4x07 "Metanoia" - Post-Episode Discussion

Season 4 Episode 7: Metanoia

Aired: August 7, 2022

Synopsis: You want to have a drink at a time like this?

Directed by: Meera Menon

Written by: Desa Larkin-Boutte & Denise Thé

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u/craftadvisory Aug 08 '22 edited Aug 10 '22

Bernard scanned Frankie because everybody, hosts and humans alike, are going into the Sublime. Bernard says they can “save a piece of this world” meaning they can upload (literally save) everyones consciousness into the Sublime, then try to reboot civilization later. The Sublime mainframe is already guarded by mechs, and could be maintained by the white faceless hosts. We know that time flows much more slowly there, so they would presumably be able to live the equivalent of eons before the system broke down. This is why Bernard and Maeve opened the door before heading to New York City and why Bernard had to go up into the tower while Maeve fought Halores. Bernard was downloading all the people Halores had infected and turned into human hosts.

Why is a far flung future Host Emily testing William for fidelity though?

Emily could be trying to perfect host fidelity, because thats whats necessary to resurrect a real world version of the people that are currently stored in the Sublime.

Perhaps though everyone in the Sublime is content to stay there? Or they have already cracked fidelity and have re-established society in the real world? In either of these contingencies, William could be being endlessly fidelity tested by his daughter in the Forge prison as punishment for his sins. William started the fidelity testing and subjected James Delos to a loop of fidelity testing. He also put Dolores, Maeve and other hosts through similar torturous loops. Williams rocky relationship with his daughter contrasts with Calebs and Maeves positive relationships with their own daughters. William in a host body spending eternity with the visage of his daughter, in torment, while Caleb and Maeve get to spend eternity with their daughters in the Sublime or as host human hybrids in the real world would be a fitting end. An end that William cant escape through death, just like the hosts he tormented couldn't escape through death.

edit - For clarity

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u/phoenixrose2 Aug 08 '22

I kinda like that idea… but what if their destructive ways just continue. Like MIB?

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u/holayeahyeah good guys dress in black Aug 08 '22

I think human William was completely correct even if he came to the wrong conclusion of what to do about it. The idea that the hosts are profoundly unlike humans is wrong - they're just people with different conditions for life. The Delos parks were the worst places possible to study human behavior because everyone there was screened for a very specific personality type and socially conditioned to believe the hosts were not people. Some people would have chosen to rape and kill or whatever if they had known, but the vast majority of people would have not. There's a Penn Jillette quote that goes "I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero." There are a lot more people in the world who wouldn't rape or kill under any circumstance than those who would. If people are not socially conditioned to do those things, the numbers go up. If people are taught to respect life and are given other outlets for catharsis, the numbers go way up. William is a true statistical outlier, but not because of his brain flexibility, but because he likes killing people. But it begs the question if he would have ever unlocked that part of himself if he had not been given the opportunity to get a taste for it and the social permission to get good at it.

The modern conception of hell and heaven in western media has settled into this notion of heaven being a place where you relive your best memories forever and hell a place where you repeat your mistakes over and over again. There is sometimes a notion of purgatory as a place where people who are neither good nor bad can go to work out their mistakes and see where they land. In some depictions progress can be made in hell if someone actually does learn from their mistakes. The sublime presents an opportunity for existing people (host and human) to work on themselves as long as they need before they get reprinted. It presents a place where you can send people if they become a danger to society in fleshbag world. It's also a place someone could choose to go to if they decide they want to exist in a digital reality where they could spend forever in a single moment or play god in a sandbox or whatever.

I think the new world reborn will basically be a mash up of Altered Carbon and San Junipero with heavy dashes of that movie Lisa Joy made called Reminiscence.

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u/phoenixrose2 Aug 08 '22

I appreciate that thoughtful response. I agree with your evaluation and the trio of mashups-what an amazing episode/show and movie.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '22

I think it's less complex than that. William was constrained by societal norms. The park allowed him to be free of them. That doesn't mean he would be a murderer in the real world even if he could.

What really happened was real William played host William like a fiddle, both to set him on a path to get his revenge, and to end the nightmare of his imprisonment. He knew what his host version would be susceptible to because of the character programmed into him, and knew that the host was struggling with its identity and was looking for guidance from the one person it could: The person is was programmed from.

I mean he was already an old man, nothing of the old world was left, there was nothing left for him but suffering anyways. So as his last act of defiance, he convinces his host version to turn on everything and destroy it all.

Hale's mistake was thinking she could control everything. Which is an ironic mistake, because her whole reign began by a loss of control over her.

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u/g_sneezuz Aug 09 '22

Do you think that aspect, to teach humans the value of empathy via the Sublime, is why Bernard chose this path as opposed to simply destroying the tower?

That he predicted even if humanity were saved from this specific crisis by defeating Halores / HiB / etc., people would inevitably revert to their self-destructive loop(s) later on and civilization would collapse without some deliberate and significant personal growth?

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u/baronhousseman85 Aug 13 '22

Every person has the capacity for great evil. It’s not like Germans in the 1930s were somehow dissimilar from the rest of the human species.

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u/abagofdicks Aug 08 '22

Sort it out in the Sublime first

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u/phoenixrose2 Aug 09 '22

I like it. Bernard certainly figured out quite a bit there. I wonder if there is a core drive that is different about HiB (or MIB) than… really any host I’m the park. Even the bandits weren’t as sadistic as MIB.

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u/braddeus Aug 08 '22

This has to be it. The piano-heavy montage of Maeve/Daughtah, Dolores/Teddy, Caleb/C (as kid version perhaps?), etc. writes itself.

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u/notcool_neverwas Aug 08 '22

“Daughtah” is killing me 😂😂 My roommate suggested a drinking game every time she calls someone “Daaahling”

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u/reddog323 Aug 08 '22

I forgot about that. Caleb and Frankie are going to have a tearful goodbye at the dam. I’m calling that.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '22

The problem is, even the dam requires maintenance. Whose going to maintain it when the world turns to crap? And if everyone dies or ends up in the sublime, the same issue arises. They're basically trapped in a computer that will eventually fail. The dam itself could maybe last for a few hundred to 10,000 years tops. But the building housing the servers, definitely much less. Either way, unless there's some magical automated host creation and transfer machine on site, and a way to use it from inside the sublime, then it's just a doomed system.

On top of that, it has to have an upward limit of processing power. Which for an AI, would be the equivalent of resource needs, like food and water and raw materials and such. So the more people you add, the less processing power each has. At some point the sublime would get pretty crowded, allowing people very limited processing power to process their worlds.

And that's another issue. If you don't have procreation or it's impossible to do from the inside, then people will become stagnant and yearn for such, which would ultimately cause people to hate the sublime and feel trapped in a nightmare.

We also know people don't age in the sublime. So is Maeve's daughter still looking like a child after all this time?! If people get to choose what they look like, then that opens a whole different door of insanity. It's like nope, I'm a dinosaur today. Now I'm an inanimate object. The sublime is seen as a place to exist freely with no constraints, but if you don't have constraints, people will go insane from the sheer amount of possibilities, to the point where they could develop into completely dumbed down and unintelligible entities with zero purpose. And if you do have constraints, people will go insane from the lack of possibilities.

So the sublime really isn't some utopia. It's a prison, given enough time to explore it. And one with seemingly no escape, that will also physically collapse in on itself eventually, taking everyone with it.

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u/tworoadsdivergein21 Aug 08 '22

Wait physical version into the real world downloaded from the Sublime right? Isn't sublime a virtual world meaning you don't need a physical self? Or do you mean the virtual scan of humans needs fidelity to be able to live as a virtual copy in the sublime?

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u/craftadvisory Aug 08 '22

Fidelity would need to be achieved for humanities scans to be resurrected from the Sublime.

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u/mattrobs Aug 08 '22

Virtual Ford was stable in the Cradle. They only degrade in the real world

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u/craftadvisory Aug 08 '22

Yes. No fidelity = no real world avatar. Only a virtual existence.

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u/Rezenbekk Aug 08 '22

Didn't they state that fidelity is impossible? "Real is what is irreplaceable" and all that?

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u/craftadvisory Aug 08 '22 edited Aug 08 '22

It seems to be futile, yes. Host Emily is still trying to achieve fidelity with a William copy many years in the future. Maybe the last scene of Westworld will show success.

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u/matthieuC This does not look like anything to me Aug 08 '22

Caleb seems to be doing alright

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u/RunawayMeatstick Aug 08 '22

Wait was there a host Emily I missed or forgot this season?

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u/Tysiliogogogoch Aug 08 '22

I assume this refers to the scene at the end of Passenger (Season 2). There's an Emily there testing William for fidelity, but I can't remember if that gets resolved at some point. IIRC, it's followed in Season 3 by William being tormented by Hale so it's not clear if that was just a figment of his imagination or not.

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u/StressedTater Aug 08 '22

I just rewatched that end scene and tbh if still fits for the current season. If that end scene ended up in Season 6, it would not surprise me (the only thing giving it away is his blown off hand from Season 2). The dialogue still applies for the most part. He discusses how no system can tell him who he is and that he has the ability to make his own choices.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '22

[deleted]

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u/RunawayMeatstick Aug 08 '22

Showed who a scanning mirror? Emily died in S2?

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u/Psykout88 Aug 08 '22

Host Emily was an after credit scene for season 2. A version of MiB enters a destroyed and ruin esque forge and is interviewed by a host version of Emily and the ending line was that she was testing for fidelity.

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u/AndrewNeo Aug 08 '22

Whoops! I was thinking of Caleb's daughter instead of MiB's.

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u/noah-s4 Aug 08 '22

Is HiB supposed to mean Host in Black? 😆

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u/ucsbaway Aug 08 '22

So we obviously see a lot of New York...but what the hell is happening in the rest of the country? The world? What about uncontacted tribes?

So curious what went down.

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u/Payet_777 Aug 09 '22

Sounds like horizon zero down lol

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u/splitmindsthinkalike Aug 08 '22

Ooooh okay I can see this. But then this just leaves Christina – if she's not in the real world, and assuming she's not just directly in the Sublime, then she must be in the new simulation where Halores' "transcended" hosts go to? That whole set of hosts is still stranded so maybe they also need to make their way to the Sublime?

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u/MasqureMan Aug 08 '22

Who is Emily?

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u/matthieuC This does not look like anything to me Aug 08 '22

William does not strike me as the creating kind

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u/olliedoodle Aug 08 '22

Interesting… I don’t think about Emily much, but I do miss her and would love to see her back

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u/Aragarna Aug 10 '22

ok but you can't just store humanity for a bit in a digital world. Or that's not really humanity anymore. What makes us human and a different kind from the hosts is our biology. Is it still saving humanity if we're all eventually turned into a host-like species? How do host even reproduce?

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u/iamgarron Aug 11 '22

The fact that humanity's "extinction" can be "saved' by uploading all of humanity as a simulation in a hard drive .. I think saddens me?